


the air that inhabits you

by Margo_Kim



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Javert Lives, M/M, Oblivious Jean Valjean, POV Jean Valjean, Post-Seine, Pre-Relationship, Romantic Confusion, Watching Someone Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-20 16:44:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18529045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: There was not one day prior to six months ago that Valjean could have imagined this: Inspector Javert reclined on Valjean's settee, his arm thrown across his eyes to shield them from the firelight. He didn't snore. Valjean had never thought that Javert snored, that is, had neverneededto wonder what noises the man (when Valjean thought of him as a man at all, which was also a novel development) might make while he slept. Now Valjean knew. He did not snore.





	the air that inhabits you

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Margaret Atwood's "Variation on the Word Sleep": _I would like to be the air/that inhabits you for a moment/only. I would like to be that unnoticed/ & that necessary._

Javert was not dead, not unconscious, but sleeping. Death or infirmary would have made more sense. Strange the places we find ourselves in our old age that would have been inconceivable in our youth. Valjean did not even need to stretch back that far for the ludicrous nature of his current situation to become evident to him. There was not one day prior to six months ago that Valjean could have imagined this: Inspector Javert reclined on Valjean's settee, his arm thrown across his eyes to shield them from the firelight. He didn't snore. Valjean had never thought that Javert snored, that is, had never _needed_ to wonder what noises the man (when Valjean thought of him as a man at all, which was also a novel development) might make while he slept. Now Valjean knew. Javert did not snore. Valjean also knew now that instead Javert, asleep, breathed like a pumping bellow. His mouth twitched and settled. He was not wearing his coat or his hat. And he was asleep.

Cosette tiptoed up with a blanket in her hands and said softly, "His back will hurt terribly in the morning. He is too tall to sleep there."

It was true, they both knew that, just as both knew that neither were going to wake him. Once stirred, he would not consent to the guest bed, likely would not even consent for Valjean to pay for his fiacre ride home. He would grab his coat, slam his hat down onto his head, and stomp out into the cold night, which had no snow but only because the sky seemed to have exhausted its moisture in the previous week with the sleeting ice rain that Javert had complained bitterly about while doing nothing to keep himself out of it. Javert ate little, drank little, and lived on his pride, for all he never swallowed it. His animating force of character was a stiff-necked duty that had led him from one resignation to the other. He'd certainly quit greater heights than the right to sleep at a friend's house.

A friend? Valjean thought as he took the blanket from his daughter. With Inspector Javert? Impossible. As impossible as Javert's sleeping presence, and yet Javert was sleeping, after tipping back his head while Cosette and Valjean discussed books he had no intention nor desire to read; when he had not straightened when the conversation was done, it had taken only the faintest suggestion of Valjean's hand to tip Javert horizontal, where seemingly without waking he dragged as much of his legs as he could onto the settee with him. Impossible, impossible, as impossible as the cause of Javert's exhaustion, a long undercover assignment among the ladies of the night who said there was a gentleman—or rather, a man in fine clothes with no gentle tendencies about him—stalking the women who made their living there. No other officer would take their case. Javert had, and now there was a man arrested who spent more in a week than Javert made in a year, and women alive and whole and free in his stead. And the work had exhausted Javert who survived on, in addition to duty and pride, the thrill of the hunt, and with those urges temporarily appeased, why should it be a surprise that now he was here, as he was? Sleeping.

Cosette said, “I think I shall retire as well. Good night, Papa.” And she kissed his cheek, her hand rested on his arm for balance as she stood on her toes to reach. She looked down at the sleeping inspector with a curious look on her face, one that Valjean could not interpret and was not wholly comfortable seeing. It was something like fondness, an unnatural look to aim at Javert who was worthy, as all men are, of mercy and forgiveness and even love. But fondness—Valjean suddenly thought that no one had ever looked upon Javert with fondness before.

(He was wrong, although he could not know it, not being aware of the contortions his own face made from time to time. Valjean himself had looked upon Javert fondly not a fortnight early when Javert, not six hours after announcing that this time he was truly done with this household forever, had returned to Rue Plumet dragging a filthy, tattering, furious street cat of a child by the arm. “I found this lost soul digging around in my pocket,” Javert said to Valjean as if this was his fault. “Would you care to save him as well?” Valjean could not speak for Mathieu’s soul, but he could attest that the boy was not in jail when he might have otherwise been. Javert was making a habit of bringing him wayward thieves. Perhaps he viewed Valjean as good as jail.)

“He scowls too much,” Cosette said. “Even sleeping.” She squeezed Valjean’s arm and let go. Valjean let her slip away, out of the room and up the stairs, to the bedroom she would be leaving soon, too terribly soon, to become a young woman and a bride. The house would be empty then, Valjean reminded himself, and he would be alone. Javert’s breathing nearly drowned out the thought.

It was possible that Valjean had never had a friend before. He'd had family, and that thought hurt as much as it ever did when he thought about them, which was not as frequently as a good man should. Family, however, was not the same as friendship; family, in the classical sense although he’d quite defied this in the case of his daughter, did not choose each other. And after, when family was gone: there'd been no friendship in Toulon. At best, Valjean had found bitter comradery among men who suffered as he suffered under the lash and the eye of the guards. Suffered under Javert—although he had been just a man in the multitudes, he was just the one lash and the two eyes, and truthfully not even that memorable of a pair. At the time, at least. In the intervening years, Valjean had come to know nothing so clearly as those eyes.

Madeleine had no friends. He could not have them, no more than Fauchelevent could. It was not friendship to lie and lie and to keep lying, it was not friendship to be only even half-known, exchanging small talk from behind cover. Fauchelevent had become a brother anew, one founded upon unanswered questions that went unasked. Cosette was his daughter, stolen in the night. And the bishop—

The greatest love that God and the Church offers is indiscriminant in its loving, and friendship is by nature discriminating. I set you higher than the rest, I cherish you above those others I might know. But did Christ Himself not have favorites? Did he not love all twelve and yet pull aside Peter, and call him His rock, and did his denial not hurt? As badly as the nails did perhaps? And yet, Jesus waited to reveal Himself to the apostles, and did not visit again when He was gone. He waited for them in heaven, as He waited for all to come to Him, and He loved them all as He loved Himself. To Valjean, this was the scale that the bishop was on, perhaps a sacrilegious view although there are plenty in the Church that thought it only fitting that bishops and the upper rankings of the clergy be viewed so close to God as to be mistaken for Him. Valjean would have scorn this uncanonized idolatry had he thought too long on it, and yet while Christ looked in Valjean's mind as he did on the crucifix of Valjean's first church, God had come to look like Myriel. Even if there had been time for intimacy between them, not one night but weeks, months, years spent at Myriel's side, Valjean would have never thought the bishop his friend. The gap between them was too great. The bishop had called Valjean by his true name, and that was "brother," not "friend."

So. Here was Javert.

Not dead, despite his earnest efforts for self-destruction. Just sleeping, as deeply as any man satisfied by his day's work has ever slept. He did not stir as Valjean crept closer. He kept breathing, loud and steady, and Valjean found himself matching the pace as he hovered over Javert’s sleeping form. What was visible of Javert's face wore the same wrinkles of his waking hours—Javert having scowled so consistently for fifty-odd years that the sneer had carved itself into the skin like stone etchings—but the lines, softened by sleep and the dancing light of the fireplace, looked etched with a lighter hand. Valjean wondered, and did not quite know why, what he himself looked like when he slept. Did he look as young as Javert did now? Did he look as vulnerable? When Valjean slept, would anyone standing over him, wishing him a silent goodnight, think to themselves, "How strange that I find this man beautiful. The evidence of my eyes and my experience ought to tell me otherwise," and would they reach for his face, for the lock of hair too close to his mouth, and then pause? Valjean did not know. There was no one he could ask. Except, perhaps, the man on the settee before him. But Javert was, as mentioned, sleeping, and Valjean thought to himself that he would rather die as he'd always feared he'd die—in Toulon, in the sea, buried under a sea-salted number—than wake this man right now.

The blanket was, therefore, a risk. Valjean had no idea how Javert slept—had not until this night considered that Javert slept at all—and he seemed comfortable enough at the moment. But it was yet early and the nights had been chilly. Javert might be cold, and therefore Valjean _would_ be cold, lying upstairs thinking on Javert sleeping uncovered in the dark parlor. The risk had to be considered. The thousand other questions Javert stirred in Valjean could be postponed until morning. Now, there was an icy certainty to the dilemma in front of him: would the weight of the blanket awaken Javert?

The risk seemed impossibly high. If awoken, he would flee. Valjean knew that, knowing the character of this man as well as he knew his own (which is to say, with near completeness but with significant gaps regarding underlying motives and the reason one’s eyes might linger on clavicles, wrists, a drop of water rolling down a freshly shaved neck.  On these subjects, Valjean maintained a near perfect ignorance, a thorough mixture of inexperience, repression, and the currently unshakeable belief, unarticulated, that he did not deserve pleasure. But that was a revelation for him on a different quiet evening, a different solitary moment light only by firelight and framing this same settee, when the two of them sit on it together, their legs touching, and neither of them flinching away from the contact, and Javert will say, “It is late,” but will not move to leave, and Valjean will realize that he has gotten too accustomed to the habit of running, and this time he will chase. But that is a different night.).

 “Javert,” Valjean whispered, silent as an exhale. Javert did not stir. Valjean took a step forward and cringed at the wood screaming under his feet. How had he never noticed such a racket before? Surely his floorboards must keep awake all of Paris. But Javert still slept. “Javert,” Valjean said, a little louder than before which meant that his ears could nearly hear what his lips were saying. He must be very asleep, thought Valjean who in his plight felt as though he were bellowing. He was filled with the perverse urge to shake Javert awake simply so his nerves would stop rattling so at the thought of waking him. He would feel better seeing Javert’s brown eyes, so dark as to be nearly black until you looked closely enough to see the rich golden undertone, blink open, the strangely long lashes fluttering open in confusion for a moment before he realized where he was…

Valjean snapped the blanket from its fold and draped it over Javert’s sleeping form. Javert did not move, there was not a hitch in his breathing, he was entirely unaffected as the blanket settled over him. His lips were slightly parted, which Valjean hardly noticed and barely thought about how the bottom one would feel if he ran his thumb over it. Javert slept on oblivious, though there was nothing to be oblivious about. Valjean had offered a place to rest to men before, as rest had been offered to him. He had let them in at night and said goodbye in the morning and thought very little about the weight of the blanket settling upon them, the way that they would in their sleep clutch the fabric and bring it closer to their chest.

If Valjean thought of this now, it meant nothing. Less than nothing. God modeled an impartial and unbiased love, and while Valjean could not help but show preference to his daughter above all others (and he could not imagine God, a father Himself, would truly fault him that), he had striven to be fair and just and, to the best of his flawed capacities, good. It was goodness surely and goodness alone he felt now watching Javert sleep, and the twinge of it, the twist in his gut that wasn’t wholly unpleasant and wasn’t at all pious, was the guilt of undue pride. That was all. Undue pride in his own perceived goodness. Valjean nodded at that, nearly satisfied by that answer. Satisfied enough, at any rate, to quell the parts of himself not satisfied. Tonight was just a night, after all, despite the strangeness of it.

And it was just a night. Now, the night that was coming—him and him and the shrinking space between them, the book abandoned on the floor in front of them with the spine forever cracked, the hands, the touches, the gasps, the pressure and release, the shame that didn’t come and the promises sworn with a fervor that left Valjean shaking—that will be later. If this current night mattered, this interlude by the fire where Valjean stood transfixed for longer than he knew watching the man in front of him dream, it mattered because he had never before considered that Javert might dream.

There was a moment, mid-revelation, where Valjean might have thrown himself into the Seine if he hadn’t thought his footsteps would wake Javert. Some emotions are like that. They pass unfortunately, and you have to live with what you have or haven’t done. By the time Valjean could move, could turn from Javert and start the long lonely walk to his bed, Valjean could not say what it was he was regretting. He did think (incompletely but not incorrectly) that he knew why he was smiling: he had never had a friend stay in his house before. And however Javert might feel in the morning (the answer was poorly, the settee never meant for a man that long), he was sleeping well now. The satisfaction of that carried Valjean along and undressed him for bed. If it abandoned him after that, if the small bed he climbed into felt, as it never had before, too vast and empty, that was Valjean’s private concern and a problem to be solved another night.


End file.
